WD And SanDisk Launch Consumer SSDs Up To 2TB Built With 64-Layer 3D NAND

This week at Computex, Western Digital announced its first line of consumer SSDs that are based on 64-layer 3D NAND memory. Western Digital is marketing the new SSDs under both its WD Blue 3D and SanDisk Ultra 3D families, and aside from labeling, they appear to feature identical specifications.

All of the SSDs will be available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, and all use a SATA 6Gb/sec interface — so don’t expect to see the insane read and write speeds typically associated with NVMe PCIe SSDs that are increasingly becoming popular in the consumer space. Instead, sequential read speeds top out at 560MB/sec, while sequential writes come in slightly lower at 530MB/sec.

Random read IOPS are listed at 95K across the board, while random write IOPS are capped at 81K for the 250GB models and rise to 84K for the larger-capacity drives. All of the SSDs come with a three-year warranty and have a MTBF rating of 1.75 million hours. As for endurance, the 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB SSDs are rated for 100, 200, 400, and 500 TBW (terabytes written).

Perhaps the only meaningful difference between the WD Blue 3D and SanDisk Ultra 3D families is that the former is available in both 2.5-inch/7mm and M.2 2880 form-factors, while the latter is only available as a 2.5-inch/7mm drive.

“Delivering 64-layer 3D NAND-based SSDs into the PC segment marks a critical step in our ongoing conversion to this new technology, as well as offers long-term benefits for our customers,” said Mike Cordano, Western Digital’s President and COO. “Between our two, strong brands in SanDisk and WD, and their respective loyal customer bases and distribution channels, these advanced SSDs will appeal to a very broad footprint of the computing population that are seeking the benefits of today’s newest technologies.”

Western Digital is being very coy about pricing and availability at the moment, only indicating that the SSDs will start from $99.99 (250GB) and will be available during Q3 2017.